2.4 Initial Meetings and Orientation

For the initial meeting of your team, consider the following agenda items:

Begin with specifying what residents’ priorities will be used for: Will the information be used for processes affecting the entire municipality or a specific policy? For example, the entire municipality will be affected by the budget, development or investment priorities, and planning. Alternatively, feedback could have lower stakes – to improve or reform an existing policy or program of the local authority, setting priorities in social, cultural and recreational development areas, which may have a nominal economic impact (i.e., street names, arts programs or community gardens). Or will it be used to strengthen the local authority’s responsiveness to a particular sector of the community, which may be underserved or face specific service needs?

Assign core team roles and responsibilities: Refer to the roles and responsibilities discussed in Section 2.3, and assign the various tasks to team members. Develop a rough draft of the work plan to organize key tasks, responsible persons and proposed timelines.

Identify gaps in collective knowledge or skills: Determine if there are any orientation and training needs for team members. For example, if the team is new to governing (perhaps many are recently elected to office), can a colleague or expert present and answer questions about the local planning or budgeting process? Orientation sessions like this can be a useful way to boost confidence, build team cohesiveness and get started on the right track.

Revisit your stakeholder analysis and plan to secure and maintain buy-in: Revisit the stakeholder analysis in Section 1.6 and add more detail if needed. At this stage, your goal (or the goal of particular team members so assigned) will be to begin identifying and contacting relevant stakeholders whose buy-in is a priority for the process.

Finally, draft a timeline for your feedback loop process: Plan a schedule of future meetings and assign tasks to be completed before the next meeting. See Section 3.3 on time planning for more details. See also Annex IV: Timeline, Budget and Team Composition for examples of real feedback loop implementation timelines from local authorities in four countries.

Signpost Question

Is there clear objective and an established timeline?

Box 12. Budgets and Local Priorities

The feedback loop will likely involve the local budgeting process in some way. Public priorities directly impact local decisions if they are used to determine what is and is not funded. Public priorities may also have an indirect impact if they are used to define the scope or nature of a particular program or service (that may or may not have a cost). Whatever you are seeking public priorities for, you should be prepared to translate that feedback clearly into the budget process so that public priorities can be realized – and seen. In other words, the public should be able to tell whether or not their feedback was ultimately used.

For more information and examples on how you can design feedback loop questions to contribute to your budget planning process – depending on whether your local authority uses line-item budgeting, program-based budgeting, performance budgeting or zero-based budgeting – see Annex V: Local Authority Budgets and the Feedback Loop.

Think on it:

Be prepared to educate the public on the process that you are seeking their input on, and be prepared to explain what you do and do not have control over. Residents may not know what the local authority is directly responsible for managing within their community. To many members of the public, a road is just a road, but a local authority may maintain local or county roads, while a national or regional ministry may manage highways and toll roads. Local utilities, such as electricity, water and garbage removal, may be run through public or private companies.